Skye Textures

That burst of orange and cream at the centre is a cloud lit from behind by a low sun, and Scott Naismith has painted it with a palette knife rather than a brush, dragging thick paint across the surface so the edges break into squares and slabs. Look at the sky around it and you will notice the colour arriving in blocks: teal, violet, rose, a stripe of hot pink where the clouds meet the hills. The mountains below are flattened into dark blue silhouettes, and the water repeats the whole show in choppy horizontal dashes, like a reflection seen through moving glass.

Naismith is a Glasgow based painter who trained at the Glasgow School of Art and has built much of his career on the landscapes of western Scotland, especially the Isle of Skye. He is open about the fact that he is not after topographical accuracy. Scottish weather changes so fast that a scene can shift completely in minutes, so he works from memory and photographs, pushing colour well past what the eye actually registers to get at how the place felt. The fragmented, almost pixelated patches come from his interest in how light scatters and refracts, and they place him in a line of Scottish painters, going back to the Colourists of the early twentieth century, who trusted bold colour over careful description.